Julie R. Enszer's Blog, page 29

Understanding Cruelty

I understand people being mean to other people; I have been mean to other people. I am not proud of it; I look back on my moments of cruelty with shame, but I understand why I did it at the time. I can occupy the feeling of wanting to be mean to people, and the satisfaction that comes from it. I understand wanting to hurt people, and I understand vengeance. I am not proud to admit any of this. These are not easy feeling and not pleasant actions, but I understand them. I have occupied these spaces. Regrets or no, I understand meanness, cruelty, vengeance from all sides.

Where I struggle is with what I call the “turncoats.” I can understand people who do not know me who are mean to me. Yes, it makes me angry, but I get it. When the owner of the dog that Tibe bit said that she wanted Tibe banished from the neighborhood and put down, I could understand her feelings. I understand vengeance when one has been injured. (This is, of course, why I do not support the death penalty; if an intimate of mine were killed, I would want revenge; I would want to invoke the death penalty. I want society to protect me and others from my basest instincts.) I can understand abstracted cruelty; I can understand cruelty to others, to people unknown.

I cannot understand when people who are friendly, when people know one another in some way, turn and are mean and cruel to people they know. These turncoats cause me the most grief and pain. They lead me to not trust myself, my instincts, my ability to judge other people and the quality of their character. I think of the people who do not like gay people for religious reasons, of the people who will not serve people wedding cakes or officiate at weddings. I can understand this behavior. They do not know the people ordering cakes. They do not know the harm that they are causing to people, unless the people have been friendly, have known the truth about people’s lives, and then decide to be mean and exclusionary.

This is not to say that I do not understand conflict and disagreement. I do, but I cannot understand being mean to someone to whom you were formerly kind, to someone to whom you have shared the basic tenants of human engagement. The most painful experiences of my life have been when people I thought were friends took a moment of great pain to hurt me further. In one incident, days after returning from my mother’s funeral, someone who I considered a friend attacked me as self-aggrandizing and egocentric. I do not doubt that both of these things are true about me, but attacking me so soon after my mother’s death? Kicking me while I was down? This is not something I can cotton.

So, one of the most painful aspects of our Tiberius situation has been the people who turned on us. I understand the anger and the desire to hurt me and my family from the owner of the dog that Tibe bit. We deserve their anger and vengeance (though again I continue to believe that we do not live or want to live in a world where anger and vengeance shape our system of justice). What I do not understand is the people who I had been friendly with, the people with whom for years I have walked dogs, the people who I had given holiday gifts, the people with whom I have gone to theate events, how could they call animal control and organize people to request that Tibe be put down? What cruelty is that? How can I ever understand this capacity in humans? How can I trust my own ability to judge people in the future? How can I trust my ability to trust people? How can I live in a world where people can be so cruel to me and to other creatures?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Confession: I am not a dog person

When I first met Kim, she had these two completely crazy black dogs. Mary Claire came to her first, a terrier/lab mix, is how Kim described Claire to me. About six months later I saw a photo of a pit bull and learned that terrier is a euphemism for pit bull. Claire always looked like she was wearing a tuxedo with a white bib on her front. She was smart as could be and tenacious. There is nothing she could not chew and destroy. She also was so aggressive and alpha. I member walking her and slipping on the ice and landing on my back. She came rushing back to me. Kim says that she was checking to see if I was okay; I knew she was coming to kill me off and remove the weak one in the pack.

Homer was Kim’s other beloved dog. He had just been with her for a few months when we met and fell in love. Before Homer joined Kim he was a pack leader for a dog pack on the east side of Detroit. A large lab/chow mix, Homer was unaltered when Kim started to tame him with some food on her front porch. Eventually as the weather got colder, he came into the house. Like Claire, Homer was wild and destructive. He ate at least two couches in the time I was with him. He, too, was fiercely protective of Claire, and Kim, and eventually me.

Together, Claire and Homer were wild dogs. They ran in a pack on the streets of Detroit before Kim took them in and always, even after years of living in our home, they had about them a wildness. They enjoyed the breakfast and dinners that we fed them. They liked sleeping on a warm bed. They walked with us, sometimes without showing that they were once wild dogs, but not often. Always, just beneath their surface was that fact, their wildness. They could have left us, fended for themselves, found another pack, led it. They were wild dogs who agreed to pretend otherwise for our sake.

Here’s the thing, though: when I first met Kim and fell in love and knew that I wanted to spend my life with her, I wanted it to be a life with one cat, maybe two. She had this fierce love for these two dogs. I thought, however, that she would love me more and as Mary Claire and Homer eventually passed away, Kim would see the serene existence we could have with just cats. I thought she would join me on the cat side of the domesticated animal world.

I was wrong. When Mary Claire passed away (tragically at a too young age), I initiated adopting Shelby, but it was for Kim. Homer liked being a singleton, but Kim was less than herself with only one dog in our home. We adopted Emma because Shelby was beside himself as a singleton. He did not know how to be. He cried when left alone and had general anxiety about the house. For two months, I took him everywhere I could with me: the post office, other errands where he could sit in the front seat next to me. It was not enough. He wanted a companion. Emma was more of a dog than he bargained for, but he loved her.

Adopting Tibe was completely my idea. Emma, like Homer, was happy as a singleton. We took long walks during the winter of her solitude. She was happy to have lots of time to sleep. I was the lonely one. Kim was working up in New York, I wanted a new dog to distract me. Somehow, over the past eighteen years my plan to convert Kim to a cat-only person had been thwarted and in the process I became a dog person. A big dog person. The kind of person who adopts a 125-pound mutt and then moves across the country to save him. I still maintain, however, I am not a dog person, just someone fiercely devoted to the critters I call family, someone willing to train them, believe in them, shelter them, and protect them. I am not a dog person, but I have learned a lot about love from these dogs and from Kim.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Not the Holiday We Imagined, but Still a Good One

We started talking about the last two weeks of December early this year. I mean back in July and August. We were looking forward to two solid weeks together, which we have not had all year as a result of the beloved’s new job and commute to New York. We imagined what the holiday would be like in our home in Maryland. We imagined opening gifts with all of the animals. We planned our trip to Michigan and a weekend for making holiday cookies and sending them out to our usual folks around the country. We planned to lounge at home together, to see a movie or two, to cook and eat and drink and sleep and celebrate.

Our holiday has not been as planned. Holed up in our undisclosed location, we have none of the objects around us of our imaginings over the past six months. There is no lounging in a kind size bed, we sleep in a full size with all of the arm and neck and back kinks that seem to come from the arrangement. There are no long hours of binge watching TV on the big screen. We watch on an iPad or on the 20 inch TV in the house. For the first time ever, I fumbled holiday cookies. I had to throw out the rum ball batter when, distracted, I put in too much rum and couldn’t figure out how to fix the proportions . After four different types of cookies, I ran out of steam. I packaged up only a few parcels and mailed them in haste. Some people got happiness in holiday baking, but some of our loved ones went without this year.

For some reason, it seems, when it rains it pours. I thought we were in Michigan to save my dear Tibe. And of course we are, but on Monday, I discovered that my grandmother is in the middle of a medical crisis and the past five days have been about doctor visits, medical tests, prescription pick ups, shots, and organizing home health care. I worry that I may be in Michigan to help my grandmother with the last months of her life and that makes me extraordinarily sad.

Still, there were lovely things about today. We did all open presents together. It was Tibe’s first Christmas, and though I fiercely maintain that there is no way he is a Christian dog (his adolescent crisis led us to a realtor and lawyer, after all), he loved opening presents. The beloved and I bought each other the same things: coats, sweaters, warm clothes, and other winter things. We had a lovely hour together, then went to attend to a variety of family issues. Now we are getting ready for a delicious dinner that the beloved has been cooking for the past few hours. So there are some things that are just as we imagined. And everything else? If I believed in signs, I might think we were meant to be here.

Filed under: personal writing, Tiberius, Uncategorized

A Year of Reading

I am still reading furiously to achieve my log of one hundred books this year. I just hit ninety and feel confident I will make it by December 31st. I was charmed by the lovely holiday card from the extraordinary Stephen Raher, who I knew when we were both kids and now he has gone on to things even more extraordinary than I would have imagined. Stephen included in his holiday card the books he has been reading. A smart, politically engaged, and righteous list. I do not think I can comparing with his, but here are the books that I found most compelling from my reading this year.

I completed reading through the entire oeuvre of Helen Humphreys. She is a writer I recommend to everyone; smart, lyrical, deeply in touch with humanity. My favorite two books of hers were Wild Dogs, an extraordinary novel (though not one for people who cannot abide animal cruelty in books), and Nocturne, a memoir about Humphreys’s brother’s death. If you are going to start with her books, start there, unless you are a huge fan of historical fiction, then start with The Reinvention of Love and read all of the other books.

I read lots of poetry collections this year. My favorite new collection was Marilyn Hacker’s A Stranger’s Mirror, but I enjoyed collections by Mary Oliver, Jacqueline Osherow, and Carrie Fountain.

My favorite memoir was Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World. It is a gorgeous, incantatory memoir of the sudden death of her husband. Equally compelling, though not new, was Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss. I also read and loved Catherine Reid’s book, Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home.

I reread a few old favorites this year, including Stone Butch Blues and The Delicacy and Strength of Lace. Both books I treasure. If you have not read them, do.

These are some of the highlights. I am excited about reading more in 2016. As an avid reader, I am always looking for the next book that is going to change my life.

Filed under: lesbian, personal writing, Uncategorized Tagged: hacker, oliver, poetry, reading

Tiberius on the Lam: Ten Ways Saginaw is the Same as (or Better Than) My Fantasy Mountain House in West Virginia

Yes, I confess, when I realized in early November that we needed another house to be with Tibe, I went out to West Virginia, hoping to pick up a cabin where we could all live together (and still drive home for an afternoon to pick up books!). Obviously, the cabin in West Virginia did not work out, so I am here in Michigan. In the end, I have decided Saginaw is the same as West Virginia, if not better. Here are my ten reasons:

10. Knotty pine kitchen. We have one here in Saginaw; the best houses in West Virginia have them.

9. Cell phone coverage. It works all of the time here in Saginaw; West Virginia, not so much.

8. High speed internet and cable. Here and works; availability was a feature for WV homes.

7. Every major chain store within twelve minutes of the house. In West Virginia, it would have been a thirty minute drive for milk.

6. Dog grooming. Emma looks gorgeous, bathed, dried, brushed; she is soft and clean and lovely. (This is the only thing that has cost more than in Maryland).

5. Two NPR stations.

4. Frankenmuth. Those chicken dinners make Kim happy.

3. My grandma. Still living in her own house at 93.

2. Seeing Mockingjay Part 2 with my dad the night that Star Wars opens so we can marvel at the crowds and feel a part of the excitement but not have to contend with a full theatre.

1. Tim Hortons. Delicious, hot donuts. What more could I ask for, ay?

Filed under: Uncategorized

Tiberius on the Lam: All about Contexts, understanding, changing, creating them

While on my morning walks, I have lots of time to think. Generally, I first load Tiberius into the car and take him to Ojibwe Park in downtown Saginaw. He loves it there. The park is empty in the early mornings, save a few people, mostly in cars, often just driving through. Today there were two police officers. Over the weekend, when I was walking with Tibe and the beloved and Emma, we saw someone who had been fishing in the Saginaw River. He walked up the bank as though he were going to approach me; Tibe barked, and the man said, oh, I know I’m not going to hurt you, and walked in the other direction. The context in which people encounter Tibe matters. 

His barking in our suburban Maryland house? Loud, unacceptable, dangerous, threatening, not appropriate for the community (by some of our neighbor’s estimations). His barking in the public park of a depressed Midwestern town where some drug deals occasionally happen and people party at night sometimes with lots of alcohol, and I assume other intoxicants of which I do not necessarily see the evidence? Reasonable, useful, prudently protective. Same dog, different context.

Of course, this isn’t a new observation. The really hot butch I might desire at the bar on Saturday night decked out in a tie, wearing wing tip shoes, might be verbally harassed even physically assaulted on Monday morning for wearing the very same outfit. Different contexts, different results.

One of the core actions of my life has been creating contexts where what is vilified about queer people, and particularly lesbians, can be celebrated and understood as special. My work is about creating contexts for queer people, queer women, to be recognized and affirmed in ways that they are not in hetero contexts. I have been doing this kind of work to create contexts since Affirmations Lesbian/Gay Community Center in the early 1990s. Today this work continues with Sinister Wisdom and other publishing projects.

So I understand the power of contexts and of creating specific contexts in which marginalized and oppressed people can recognize and affirm their lives. The experience with Tiberius reminds me of the significance of creating contexts that resist and challenge the oppressive contexts in which we live.

Yet, the experience also reminds me that we cannot cede the contexts that seek to diminish, erase, and harm us. This part of the equation is always more challenging for me. I understand creating new contexts; I understand separating from a larger, oppressive context and creating a different, new, affirmative one. I do not yet know or understand how to challenge and transform the contexts that harm. And when I encounter them, I find them so painful and gut-wrenching that I often lose my bearings.

How can we challenge homophobia? How can we challenge contexts that see to diminish and harm us without absenting ourselves? I do not know how to answer these questions. I wish I did. I wish I knew how I could change the context in Maryland for Tibe. I wish I knew how to challenge the bullies and bigots in the places where they thrive.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Tibe’s Ankle

  

This evening I purchased seven tubes of Chapstick. Even though it is unseasonably warm here, today about fifty-five degrees, though rainy all day, my lips are chapped. Even in Maryland, I would buy a supply of Chapstick at this time of year, but this purchase felt particularly urgent. I know when I am stressed, I lick my lips, and when I am really stressed, I look for small pieces of chapped skin that I can bit with my teeth and pull off. That moment of pain when it cuts into healthy flesh reminds me I am alive, able to feel pain. I do not like it though when my lips bleed. Hence, the urgency of the Chapstick. Protection from wind and cold; protection from my own desire to bit, tear, and rip. Protection may be one of the themes of the year. I am Tibe’s Chapstick. I am Tibe’s chance for a happy, well-adjusted life.

When Tibe went into exile (for those starting reading here, Tiberius had a moment of poor choices and he bit another dog; the owner called animal control; a mob of angry neighbors called animal control; the chief of animal control came into my house, sat at my dining room table, and told me he wanted to impound my beloved Tibe at the shelter that kills 800 dogs a month; I said no; I said we would send him to live outside the county; the chief of animal control lied to us the day he came to take my baby; he said we could have a preliminary hearing to bring him back home; the following Tuesday he called and said no hearing; Tibe would have to remain in exile until the hearing), when Tibe went into exile, his beloved rescue mom gave him an antler to chew. None of our dogs have ever had antlers to chew, but Tibe loved them. He held them with his front paws and chewed them and in the chewing and the rubbing he worked a band around his right paw where the hair is thinner and shorter. You can see it in the photo.

Now almost three weeks into our life on the lam, Tibe’s ankle is still banded. The skin is healthy where the band is and so is his fur. Believe me, Emma, the St. Bernard, has had lots of skin issues. I monitor the condition of the dogs skin more than the condition of my own lips and hands. I do not want any small skin inflammation to bloom into something larger. Sometimes Tibe licks his ankle where it is banded, but there is no wound, no inflammation. Just this small band around his ankle.

I try to imagine Tibe’s ankle as banded by a bracelet, but it never becomes a beautiful little bauble. It is never the coral bracelet I wear for protection or the sterling silver band that reads in Hebrew, I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, from the Song of Songs. Tibe’s ankle never makes me think of jewelry, of beautiful embellishments for his perfect soul.

Tibe’s ankle makes me think he is marked. It’s appearance, corresponding with his exile, makes it more like the ankle band of a parolee than the bracelet of a debutante. While I love every inch of Tibe’s body, this band has become a symbol for me that our lives a being surveilled, that we are subject to scrutiny in a system where we have not control, where there are no laws, and no one has our best interest at heart.

Tibe has not had an antler in three weeks. I keep waiting for his hair to grow back. For this ghostly ankle band to disappear, but it seems to be bigger and more pronounced each day as we wait for his hearing. I can buy Chapstick. I can remove Tibe from the neighborhood where people threaten to carry guns to kill him. Will this be enough protection for my little pup? Can I transform his ghostly shackle into Wonder Woman’s bracelets, deflecting bullets and absorbing energy from long falls? I feel like I need the magic of the Amazons and the miracle of the Maccabees. All I should need is a little bit of kindness, compassion, and care.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Remembering My Epistolary Heritage

  

This photograph shows about half of the card and correspondence boxes my mother had when she died. My father has kept them on a bookshelf since she died almost three years ago. Yesterday, I looked through them and selected these boxes as my own for correspondence while we are on the lam. Without counting, I estimate that I will need to write 180-250 letters to use them all. Can I mail out that much correspondence before I reach the last coffee filter?

Already, I have run out of Chapstick. I was effective in my packing. There have been very few items for which I have needed to run to the store. Mainly consumables. I suppose Chapstick is a consumable, but I actually thought I was coming here with a good stash. I have gone through at least four stick while in Michigan. They probably were not all full, but still. My lips are always dry. Chapstick and paper clips. I do not know how I forgot those, but I am without any. I always recycle them, but still consume a fair number each month. I looked for some when I was picking up maxi pads at the Rite Aid (those I forgot entirely, but am now all set), but they only had the cheap metal kind. I have become fond of the more decorative ones, wrapped in some type of colorful polymer. It will be worth it to me to make the extra effort and go to Staples.

In addition to my mother’s cards and stationary ready for corresponding (including embossed pink stationary! So not my style, but I am very excited to use it!), I found a box of cards and letters that she saved which had been written to her, including letters from me and my sister Lara. Now this would have been deeply touching–she saved letters that we wrote from camp and college–except she saved everything. Somehow, the letters seem less special combined with every throw rug she ever owned, dozens and dozens of cashmere sweaters and enough make up to cover every employed and unemployed actor in New York. Perhaps I am just unsentimental. Perhaps. She did save them, even though many had mold.

I sorted through them all, saving the ones from me and my sister Lara as well as a thick correspondence my mother had with someone I never met in the 1960s. I am going to read through them some winter evening, hopefully when it is snowing, just to ensure the maximal aesthetic experience. What was interesting to me uncovering this box was that while I had always known I am a letter writer (I am still corresponding with my best from from middle school via mail) I had not remembered that I come from a family of letter writers. Lara was prodigious in her output to mother. My mother herself was clearly a dedicated correspondent in her 20s and 30s. I must have known this, but I would not have ascribed my letter writing fetish to my mother. Until I found that box. Now I recognize a heritage of letter writing.

I respond to all letters. Write to me in Saginaw and maybe you will receive a letter in the mail on pink embossed stationary.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Tiberius on the lam: Homophobia and Homesickness

The sky was beautiful this morning. Pink. Gold. Yellow. All emerging from the dark as Tibe and I walked in our park. There is an area of the park we had not yet explored with picnic tables built into the ground and fire pits for grilling. The park is completely empty every day except for one or two people. On Monday there was a fisher. On Tuesday, a woman who walks, we have seen her a few times; bundled up against the cold. She always waves, friendly, as if she knows us. This morning, no one, but warmer. We walked through the picnic area, and it was almost like a lost world. Tibe sniffing with great purpose. I imagining the long gone people grilling and talking and laughing.

Saginaw has lost almost half of its population in the years I have been on the planet. When I was born there were just over 90,000 people living in the town. Today, there are about 50,000 people in the city. Like Detroit, a key question is how to live in a town built to serve more people when the population has fled? I am keenly interested in the question, but I am happy to have an empty park in the morning for my pup. After we walk, I take out the twenty foot leash and he runs around with one of his favorite toys, blue dragon. Jumping and nipping and joyful. He burns off all of that morning energy then trundles back in the car to go home so I can walk Emma.

Emma is taking long leisurely walks as she always does with me. This morning though she worried we had strayed too far from home and wanted to turn around half way, not realizing we were going in a circle. I told her, Emma, trust me, I’ve been here before. She was relieved after our fifty minute walk to smell the grass of home. More importantly, she was ready for breakfast.

The morning ritual, especially when I am alone, is long, but I enjoy it. Snippets of NPR when I drive Tibe to the park. Then when I am done a homemade latte.

The beloved lost her telephone so part of today was dedicated to getting her a replacement phone. This I thought would be easy. No such luck. The first clerk at the Sprint store physically recoiled when I said I needed a replacement phone for my wife. It has been so long since I have seen the terror and anger and hatred in someone’s eyes when I come out that I was shocked. It also took me a minute to realize what was happening. It did not compute for me that someone would have a negative reaction to me buying a phone (it was after all, a phone store), of course, the reaction was not about the phone. Then she said, I can only see the phone to the customer. She will have to come in herself. 

I walked out. More frustration ensued. Finally, I bought a phone from Best Buy with service from a lovely young woman named Chastity. The whole process exhausted me.

This experience combined with a series of micro aggressions at one of the places where I work that are also deeply homophobic makes me remember my experiences in Michigan twenty and twenty-five years ago. I remember seeing people defeated by homophobia. Sometimes the homophobia was big, nasty, clear, incontrovertible. Sometimes it was more difficult to name. Always though it just ground people down. Yet they always said, It could be worse, I have my health, I am comfortable, I have a job, some resources. True. And yet.

On the day of the Obergefell decision, I posted to Facebook (with many others–this is not an original quip): we are now free to move around the country. And we are, but six months after the decision, I wonder, are these examples of homophobia I see and experience part of a broader backlash? Can we now move about the country married only to discover new forms of homo-hatred?

I think about those questions today and through this process of being rooted out of my neighborhood by ostensibly nice, liberal white people. Do they secretly enjoy making life difficult for the dykes with their loud, unruly dog? And what if it isn’t a secret?

Always haunting me during this neighborhood conflict was what happened to Sue Pittmann and Christine Puckett in the suburbs of Detroit on May 5, 1992. It feels like an eon ago when they were shot and killed by their neighbor, someone with whom they had on going conflict. When he was arrested he just said, I had to do it. Initial reports in the newspaper were that it was a conflict between neighbors over a fence. In fact, these two open lesbians were shot and killed in cold blood and with no remorse by their next store neighbor. Bigotry and homophobia kill lesbians. I have thought about Sue and Chris often in the past two months.

How do we talk about our daily experiences with homophobia? How do we bring language to the experience and share it in order to change it? How do we acknowledge the daily diminishments we experience as queer people? How do we change a world that continues to devalue, berate, and hate us?

With all of these reflections on homophobia comes a good bit of homesickness today. I want to sleep in my own bed with the good, thick cotton sheets. I want to be back in my purple office. The irony of course is, I am in my first home and can if I want sleep in the original bed of my teenage years. While this house does feel like home with me, the beloved, Vita, Emma, and Tibe, I still miss the home I have known for nearly fifteen years.

This is the nature of transitions, however, the yearning for what has passed, the frustration of the current conditions. Another friend in her own transition wrote:

I still let my fears of what now, what next? propel me back to anxiety, worry, self-doubt. What if I never teach again? How will I explain to anyone in a few years that this waitress has a Master’s Degree and has taught many important classes and writes things even though no one wants to publish them? What if I become a homestead farmer and am actually happy with it and stop writing but drink so much wine every day because all I ever wanted to do was write? 

She will find what is next. Her poems will be published (they are gorgeous). I will hold that truth for her while I go and pour myself a glass of bourbon.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Tiberius on the lam: Measuring Time

The shock of the turn that our lives have taken is wearing off. I no longer wake up with the metallic taste in my mouth from adrenaline and stress. The daily crying ended. I have a deep sense of peace with the decision that we made to leave behind life in Maryland, removing Tibe from the neighborhood where people talked about needing to carry guns to kill him. Now, no longer in the space of shock and crisis, I am in the space of uncertainty. Where will we move next? When? At what point will I be thinking and writing with all of my books again? 

The truth is, I do not know. That fact may be as anxiety provoking as the harassing calls from neighbors, the daily interaction with animal control. Rather than a particular date on the calendar when we will all be resettled, I have some benchmarks to measure our time on the lam.

Today I suspended our subscription to The New York Times. I can suspend it for six months, retain digital access, and then restart it at our new home, avoiding any cancellation. So this is one time benchmark: the six month window from the Times. (And given that the Times will not do daily delivery in Saginaw, the house on Court Street seems less desirable.)
I have a prescription that needs to be renewed in April. I would like to have a new doctor by then. In the same vein, I hurried on my way out of town to get my teeth cleaned. I am good for six months, but I am dedicated to regular oral hygiene, so I need by May to see a dentist again.
There are two hundred coffee filters in the packet we bought for the new Mr. Coffee here at the house.  We use just one a day. This is the firm line I will hold. I can see a dentist in Saginaw and find a doctor. I can even see my way to cancelling the Times, but if I use up all of these coffee filters,  something has gone terribly wrong.
Across the street from the Court Street Victorian is an old elementary school that is for sale. I imagine buying it and turning it into an artist colony. A room for a letter press printer, writing studios, art studios. It is a short walk from downtown. Summer residencies for writers and artists and musicians. There is so much space here. It invites the wildest of considerations for how we might spend our lives. Do large spaces open new perspectives on time? Or is it just me?
I think part of why we we’re compelled to move, to shake up our lives, is that I have been struggling with two poems, each about smelling honeysuckle. Though I do not believe this, I think God was frustrated with all of the writing about honeysuckle. How many times can one person smell it? How many poems can one write about it? Is the reason that the poems could never quite be completed because I was spending too much time attending to honeysuckle and not to other, perhaps more important, things?
There are many things I miss for moments from the house we lived in: my books, the perfect bedside table, the couches in my office, the washing machine. I can live though with what I have, and I can pack up what I need to live in less than a week. I can flee and bring with me what is most valuable in a short period of time. I have the agility of my ancestors. When the barbarians are at the gate, I know what to grab. I know when to go.

Filed under: Uncategorized